Category: Quotes

"Shopping bores me, except when it comes to food. I feel about fruits and vegetables the way Carrie Bradshaw feels about shoes. An oyster mushroom the size of a tree stump? I must have it. Those exquisite French Breakfast radishes that taste so good with butter and salt? Two bunches, please. I can easily walk away from a farmers’ market with far more food than I can use—no simple feat, since I have a family of five to feed. So it’s really no surprise that I find myself, every few weeks, throwing away wilted, rotten things from the depths of my refrigerator. As I sheepishly march the shriveled parsnips and soupy bags of decomposed dill from the crisper to the trash can, I can hear a familiar voice chastising me—a voice that sounds remarkably like my mother’s."

"You’re a griller if you need only one napkin, if you cook boneless skinless chicken breasts and portobello mushrooms marinated in extra virgin olive oil and sea salt, and if you can have dinner on the table in 30 minutes or less."

"You’re a barbecuer if you need a stack of napkins and a moist towelette, if you cook a hurkin’ brisket rubbed with a secret formula of dried herbs and spices, and if you don’t plan to have dinner ready until the next day."

"People ask me: why do you write about food, and eating and drinking? Why don’t you write about the struggle for power, security and love, the way others do?

They ask it accusingly, as if I were somehow unfaithful to the honour of my craft.

"The easiest answer is, to say that like most other humans, I am hungry. But there is more than that. It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food, security and love, are so mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the other. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it… and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied… and it is all one.

"I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love."